Cycles (the new Blender renderer) has an awesome ability to chew through Geometry.
It leverages the power of your video card to perform floating-point operations
(in parallel, no less) and performs really well (but your screen will be locked
up completely, as your GPU is busy with other things).

So it seemed to be time to really get to grips with it. I used this tutorial:

On the other hand, taking this picture with a camera would
be very hard too, definitely a candidate for HDR simply due
to the range needed.

sRGB is also very limiting, here I've tried to get the dynamic
range correct without resorting to using 'Bloom'. It was a fun
exercise, certainly interesting to come at lighting from the other
way around.